Exploring the echoes reverberating through time left by the technology of yesterday as we embrace the technology of tomorrow.

AI in the news: week of November 16, 2025
AI in the News

AI in the news: week of November 16, 2025

OpenAI surprise-launches GPT-5.1 with a tone-picker. Anthropic reportedly commits $200B to Google Cloud. Moonshot's Kimi K2 Thinking, a trillion-parameter open-weight model that beats GPT-5. Microsoft Ignite warming up. My take on the week.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 10 min read
Article 4: Fail fast, three strikes
Automation

Article 4: Fail fast, three strikes

When something is broken you get three attempts to fix it before you must stop and re-plan. Why 'just one more try' is the failure mode, and why the rule matters most when an agent is the one trying.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read
A precision brass calibration dial on a polished wooden lab bench with a small magnifying loupe resting beside it
Personal AI

The case for local DSPy: optimizing prompts without leaking them

DSPy lets you optimize prompts the way you'd optimize a model, programmatically, against an objective, with structured evaluation. The default DSPy workflow sends a lot of prompts to a hosted optimizer. The local-first version is doable, faster than expected, and worth the setup.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 5 min read
AI in the news: week of November 9, 2025
AI in the News

AI in the news: week of November 9, 2025

OpenAI-AWS $38B makes multi-cloud official. Moonshot's Kimi K2 Thinking is the first open-source model to beat GPT-5 on agentic benchmarks. Apple reportedly pays Google $1B/yr for Siri. Ironwood TPUs ship. The concentration story cracked.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 10 min read
Article 1: No issue, no code
Automation

Article 1: No issue, no code

The first article of my personal coding constitution: every change starts with a tracked issue, not a commit. I had to write this rule down for myself before I'd live by it. Then I had to write it down again for the agents I work with.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read
A stack of paper folders on a dark wooden desk with a dusty rubber stamp resting on top showing nothing readable
AI

The PII problem nobody wants to own

Every AI team I've talked to has the same problem: private information moves through their tools, and nobody on the team owns it. The gap is real, it's getting wider, and something will force the issue. Here's the breakdown, and who should own it.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read
AI in the news: week of November 2, 2025
AI in the News

AI in the news: week of November 2, 2025

GitHub Universe ships Agent HQ. Big-tech earnings push 2025 AI capex past a quarter trillion. Amazon cuts 14k jobs the same week. OpenAI completes its PBC restructuring. Cursor ships its own model. The week that made the AI capex-vs-jobs trade explicit.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 9 min read
Observability for AI workloads: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki
AI

Observability for AI workloads: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki

Latency, token throughput, cost-per-request, queue depth, drift. Prometheus for the metrics, Loki for the prompts and responses with PII discipline, Tempo for the tracing across agent calls. The dashboard JSON itself as a Decisions as Code surface, projected per-environment.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read
A vintage organizational chart blueprint partially unrolled on a draftsman's wooden desk with a brass paperweight holding it down
AI

An AI workforce: a framework for thinking about agent orchestration

The keynote pitch for agent orchestration is engineering-shaped, pipelines, queues, message buses. The framing that holds up better in production is workforce-shaped, roles, teams, supervisors, performance review. Worth being explicit about why.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read